Word: wilmut
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Extraordinary claims, scientists like to say, require extraordinary proof, and none has been more extraordinary in recent years than Scottish embryologist Ian Wilmut's claim that he and his colleagues had cloned a sheep named Dolly from a mammary cell of a pregnant ewe. More than a year later, nobody has managed to reproduce the Dolly experiment, and Wilmut is under growing pressure to prove that his famous sheep is what he says she is. Last week at a genetics meeting at the University of Louisville, in Kentucky, he blandly conceded that there was a "remote possibility" that there could...
...does that mean all the cloning hoopla Dolly set off was for naught? Not quite. What Wilmut is conceding is that Dolly's mom--or should we say her twin sister?--probably had some fetal cells circulating in her bloodstream, and that one of these fetal cells could conceivably have found its way into the laboratory culture from which Dolly sprang. Cloning an embryo from a fetal cell, of course, would not be as big a deal. What made the Dolly experiment so extraordinary was that Wilmut had managed to get the DNA of an adult cell to revert...
...Wilmut last week put the chances that Dolly was some sort of fetal-cell contamination at less than a million to one. Nonetheless, he and his colleagues are scrambling to track down any other tissue samples taken from Dolly's mom so they can perform the genetic tests that will determine, once and for all, if Dolly's DNA and her mom's DNA are identical...
...this comes as no surprise, says Stice, the chief scientist for Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass. After all, it took Wilmut's team 400 tries to create Dolly. Others attempting to reproduce the experiment could very easily find it takes 6,000 tries. Dolly, in other words, may turn out to be a fluke, not a fake. No matter what she is, it's looking less and less likely that we're going to see clones of Bill Gates or Michael Jordan anytime soon...
...remote possibility" that he used a fetal cell to create her rather than an adult cell. What's the difference? About a year's worth of attention from the world press, since scientists have been able to "clone" animals from fetal cells for about two decades now. As Ian Wilmut of Scotland's Roslin Institute sheepishly admitted to a genetics forum at the University of Louisville, fetal cells might have been present in the circulatory sytem of Dolly's clone mother during the time he took his now-famous 277 genetic samples. "We and everybody else had completely overlooked...